Figaro Makes a Triumphant Return to City Opera

The walls of the set may be a little more rickety and its color schemes may be a little more dated, but John Copley's production of Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, first staged in the 1970s, is as exuberant as ever. This season, New York City Opera maintains that youthful energy by presenting two stars in their City Opera debut, including Kyle Ketelsen in the title role and Brett Polegato as his rival.

Mozart's opera, always popular with younger audiences not entranced by the passionate suicides of Puccini and the sturm und drang of Wagner, is particularly accessible in this production, which is unencumbered by contemporary social commentaryor, for that matter, any seriousness at all. Despite the 18th-century setting, which allows the characters to throw around terms like "prima nocte," the themes are eternal: many men in love with the same woman; an adolescent in love with many women; and a woman faced with a choice between wealth and love.

The cast presents those concerns with an appropriately light touch without sacrificing artistic or technical precision. Ketelson's rich bass-baritone is well-suited to Figaro, and his youthful agility allows fast pacing on stage as he and his castmates dash about hiding from and conspiring with each other. Importantly for the lead in a comic opera, his timing is impeccable, and the dexterity with which he extracts himself from one sticky situation after another is one of the production's chief delights. As Susanna, Figaro's fiancée and Count Almaviva's illicit obsession, Christine Brandes is equally nimble, masterminding one ruse after another to keep both men in her power while protecting the ardent young page Cherubino (Rinat Shaham) who is in love with her one minute and with Countess Almaviva (Pamela Armstrong) the next.

Caught in the middle of the Figaro-Susanna-Count Almaviva love triangle, the Countess can seem powerless and even pathetic, but Armstrong, aided by her flawless soprano and bewitching beauty, portrayed the wife of the amorous Count as if she were playing a rather amusing parlor game whose happy outcome is never really in doubt. Brett Polegato's dashing Count may be the victim of most of the tricks within that game, but his façade of aristocratic detachment, breached only by Susanna, made him the perfect straight man in a cast crowded with comedians, and his nuanced baritone lent the role a suave refinement.

The production's sole flaw, beyond the aging set, was Steven Mosteller's conducting, which occasionally seemed to take on a life of its own unrelated to the action on stage. But that over-exuberance can perhaps be interpreted as a sign of this staging's strength; after all, if a conductor who has seen it so many times before can still get excitedly lost in it, how much more enraptured will the audience be?